Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Secretly Helped “Victims” of Media Bullying

Gawker Media, a gossip website, finds itself entangled in another lawsuit, and this time it is a billionaire the group outed a decade ago. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, one of richest and most prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs today, financed a lawsuit that may potentially collapse the Gawker's business.

It has just been recently revealed the Paypal's former co-founder and one of Facebook's earliest investors was one of the benefactors that helped Terry Gene Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) won a lawsuit against the company. The WWE Hall of Famer sued the media outlet after the former had published a sex tape involving him and a female friend for a hefty $140 million.

It was only recently when the public and the jury who were involved in the case learned that Peter Thiel contributed $10 million as a benefactor.  This was in response to the blog entry released by Gawker back in 2007.  The tech billionaire mustered up the courage to fund a team of lawyers to assist other "victims whose lives have been ruined".  It has also been known that several of Thiel's friends were affected by the 2007 headline.

After his identity was revealed as a primary benefactor of the case, Petier Thiel took no time agreed to appear in an interview. According to the young billionaire, the whole idea was not to revenge and was more about specific deterrence. "I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest," he added.

Aside from the fighting a group he found to be "bullying others'. Peter Thiel also donated a big sum of money to the Committee to Protect Journalism. He also emphasized that despite what he had done against Gawker media, he still believes that journalism should be not be equated to privacy violations.